All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk — an ole and fitting saying from my long-ago Red, Black & Green Liberation upbringing that could be well applied to the Sixth Annual installment of the New York City-based Afro-Punk Festival. Last week, there were … Continue reading “Afro-Punk 2012: Apocalypse”
Detail of massive ferry, while still in Piraeus port All but two of the dozens of flat-screen TVs on the many upper decks of the giant ferry E. Venizelos (now en route from Piraeus to Chania) were tuned to the … Continue reading “Notes from Europe: Rosa Nera”
In Thessaloniki: This bank is French-owned. Stand-off: police attack social center (video still). Heat conspired with exhaustion to make the train ride from Thessaloniki to Athens seem cruelly extenuated. We could only blame ourselves. We’d stayed up all the previous … Continue reading “Notes from Europe: from Thessaloniki to Athens”
This special issue of Social Text will examine discourses of physical debility and social mobility in concert with social movement politics, broadly construed. The broader rubric of disability is an especially apt lens through which to launch a political agenda, if only … Continue reading “CFP: Movement Politics”
One of the members of my working group, The People’s Think Tank, recommended me as a good person to speak to young activists last week at the Civil Rights Student Summit in New York organized by Teaching Matters. The folder they gave to the set of people they brought in to speak to the students, most of whom were in eighth grade, said “community activist” on the front. Reading that brought me back to a discussion facilitated by the Think Tank on May Day, where we got to talking about what it meant for us to be activists. When it was my turn to speak, the only words on offer were something like “I really don’t like to think of myself as an activist. I kind of want to think of myself as a normal person.
Note the flag above. In Berlin each morning we woke to the improvisations of little Domingo in his cage ringing changes from the basic canary songbook. Was Danny’s pet canary a genius? We couldn’t pretend to know why this caged … Continue reading “Notes from Europe: Berlin”
Appearing not once, but twice in Facebook’s Securities and Exchange Commission-mandated IPO Registration document is a beautiful map by Paul Butler. It is not hard to see why the map plays a large role in the document. It symbolizes the global reach … Continue reading “Mapping and Counter-Mapping Facebook”
Survival is our politics now. So says French political anthropologist Marc Abélès in The Politics of Survival. And so say many cultural producers today, although this admission often comes by way of what cultural theorist Fredric Jameson called the political … Continue reading “Staying Alive”
They’re returning to time-tested austerity measures in the West of Ireland.
See also: The Art of Google Books
The Occupy Movement has revived May Day. For far too many years, this holiday, which was of course also a solidarity-building occasion, has been ignored by the US labor movement.
It was and remains a great inspiration to have participated in yesterday’s Labor Day rally in Manila. Along with the electrifying militancy of a large number of leftist organizations including unions, political parties, campus activists, national activists, women’s advocacy groups … Continue reading “Labor Day Manifestation sa Maynila”
Snapshot from May Day demonstration in New York’s Union Square.
It was and remains a great inspiration to have participated in yesterday’s Labor Day rally in Manila. Along with the electrifying militancy of a large number of leftist organizations including unions, political parties, campus activists, national activists, women’s advocacy groups … Continue reading “Labor Day Manifestation sa Maynila”
